The present invention relates to interactive television program guide (“IPG”) systems and personal video recording (“PVR”) systems, and more particularly to enhanced PVR-IPG features.
Interactive television systems such as interactive television program guide systems are now widely available to the general public. Interactive television program guide systems may be used to provide interactive television services such as services for allowing a user to tune to a program, to set parental locks, to record a program, to set reminders, etc. Interactive program guide systems are illustratively described, for example, in Knee et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,589,892, and Knudson et al. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/357,941, filed Jul. 16, 1999, which are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
In recent years, PVRs such as those provided by companies such as Tivo and ReplayTV have become available. Such systems and devices may be used to provide interactive television services such as services for recording television programs onto a digital medium, such as a hard disk. In one known system, a PVR may use an MPEG encoder to digitize broadcast television and then store the digitized broadcast television for later retrieval on a hard disk drive. In such systems, a digitized broadcast may be converted to an analog NTSC signal for display on a television.
In conventional PVRs, a program buffer is typically used to allow users to pause, rewind, or playback a television broadcast that a user is watching. A PVR buffer is typically a circular buffer that stores the most recent “n” minutes of programming that was watched by a user. One drawback of this buffering technique is that the buffer only allows the user to pause or rewind up to the last “n” minutes and only on the currently tuned channel since it was most recently tuned.
Conventional PVR systems may also provide other features such as features for allowing users to select to record television content. In such systems, a live program is typically recorded from the point at which a user requests the program to be recorded. One drawback of such systems is that portions of the live program that were previously buffered are typically ignored.
In such systems, interactive television services are typically provided to users through the presentation of graphics. One drawback of such systems is that the presentation of the graphics may undesirably cause a user to miss live television content that the user is watching.
Another drawback of known PVR systems is that such systems do not typically support pay-per-view television programming. Pay-per-view (“PPV”) television programs are now widely available through cable television service providers, but are not typically supported by PVRs for scheduling recordings or providing other types of PVR-related functionality.
Improvements to these IPG and/or PVR systems are desirable to alleviate these and other drawbacks and to simplify the use of such systems while providing additional functionality to television viewers. Accordingly, new systems and methods for interactive program guides with personal video recording functions are provided.